One Impossible Idea: Why Pete Shadbolt left academia to build PsiQuantum

0:02Make chips where we have a heater on the chip that is a few hundred degrees celsius so it is above the boiling point of water and would burn you if you touch it. that's going to be millimeters away from superconductive detectors below the temperature of deep space so 2.3 kelvin wow shine a laser into the chip that's a trillion times brighter than the single photon that we have to detect so the optical dynamic range on the chip is equivalent to the optical dynamic range between a ship mounted u.s navy laser weapon and the dimmest star visible to the human eye we're going to achieve like you know 99 percent fidelity despite all of that thermal and optical dynamic range.

0:42We're going to fiddle a completely new class of cryostat for quantum computing, the chandelier thing that everyone uses, that's going to go in the trash. If you want to hear what it sounds like when someone devotes their entire life to a singular, almost impossible idea, this is the conversation. And honestly, what a way to close out season five. Peter Shadbolt is the co-founder of SciQuantum, a company building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer, a machine that, if it works, could change the trajectory of civilization. From the way we design drugs, fertilizers, and fuels, to how we simulate molecules and understand nature itself.

1:22Quantum physics has a long history of mystique. Richard Feynman once said, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. But this conversation isn't about the mysteries around understanding quantum mechanics. This is about the engineering. This is about building the company that turns the elegant truth of math into cold hardware that brings value to our lives. It's not a research project, it's a moonshot company built by physicists who swore off academia, raised a billion dollars and now operate inside one of the most advanced semiconductor fabs in the world. In this episode, Peter explains why a million cubits is the real goal, not 300, not 3 ,000 and what it takes to build an organization capable of reaching it.

2:06He walks us through the assembling of world-class experts in everything from fiber optics to aerospace to welding. And in the most human moments, he reminds us that some people are wired to take one shot at something historic and never look back. This is Wild Hearts with Peter Shudbolt.

2:24You said it was besides the most interesting thing you could be doing with your life why you know people still can't give you a straight answer on what is going on in quantum mechanics i'm sure you've had the experience of sitting down to read a piece of popular science about superposition or entanglement or quantum computing and if you're anything like me like you start reading the article and you're optimistic and you're hopeful and you feel like when i get to the end i'm gonna have this like burst of wisdom and you get to the end and you think this has done nothing for me like this is just a brilliant piece of writing that has taught me nothing and that is the profound mystery of quantum mechanics the mathematics is rock solid 100 years old like completely undebatably correct most accurate theory of physics we've ever discovered describing it in natural language remains completely elusive and so the prospect of building a machine that wields that kind of mysterious capability at scale is spiritually pretty thrilling to me like that's uh stepping firmly into unexplored territory for humanity and to have an opportunity to work on something like that is pretty thrilling and then there's a sort of day-to-day component of it which is that psyquantum is an organization that is only doing one thing our only job is to realize a million qubit fault tolerant quantum computer but along the way we're doing beyond state of the art work from the nanometer to the millimeter to the kilometer everything in between and so you've got people in the company who are the world expert on you know silicon nitrides waveguide deposition you've got people who are the world expert on high power cryogenics at the kind of meter scale you've got people who've built you know 200 000 square foot fab for hard disks and theorists in you know topological quantum error correcting codes and everything all pulled together welders builders people laying concrete you know go to market people government people and just to have that you know very high dynamic range very broad group and to be able to put something in front of them that's just like unambiguously extraordinary hard, unambiguously incredibly valuable, and say, get after it.

4:49That's an extremely exciting environment to be involved in, especially when it's actually working, which it is, when we're knocking down these challenges on a daily or hourly or weekly basis. It's just thrilling to be involved in it. And you said the word spiritually. How long have you been obsessed with quantum computing? so originally i was obsessed with computers like when i was a kid yeah family friends uh gave us a copy of turbo pascal so one of the early programming languages 486 my dad had a 486 pc and so i was just obsessed with writing video games on that thing and specifically i was obsessed with like getting physics moving around on the screen i remember the first few times i got rudimentary physics models so you could see stuff bouncing around um that was just like compelling to me is it how old were you yeah probably 12 something like that far out and then yeah like went and studied physics and pretty rapidly like that encountered yeah double slit experiment and entanglement and these things that people would tell ghost stories about pretty much like you know when we were studying physics they'd come it's you know the air would suck out of the room and they'd sit you down and tell you something about something that people still found kind of mystifying.

6:09Yeah, that was like immediately attractive to me. And then actually one of the great privileges of doing that physics undergraduate, physics PhD with Jeremy and Coe was to do experimental quantum physics in the lab in Bristol. So Jeremy had started out in Brisbane doing the same thing with Jeff Pride and others, you know, doing quantum optics on a bench. And then when I showed up at Bristol, you know, I had this thing on a bench with entangled photons in it. And so almost literally with my bare hands, I was in superposition and entanglement and doing bell tests, violating bell inequalities and all of these things that I'd read about.

6:52And yeah, it like when that when it clicked that this is just real as part of the real world and it's still so kind of baffling from a kind of natural language point of view yeah that was that was really special what is so baffling and mysterious about it what why do we struggle to grasp what it is yeah so so jeremy will kill me by the our ceo who started out in brisbane and elsewhere where he'd kill me for saying this because, and he's right, which is that, you know, his obsession is that people over mystify quantum physics and quantum computing. And he's categorically right in a sense, which is that the math is established for a hundred years or so.

7:38It's actually really simple mathematics, fits on a business card, let alone a postcard. And if you want to have an impact on people's lives the right thing to do is not to spend all day striking your chin and wondering about how mysterious it is the right thing to do is to get on and build it and uh that is what we do in the company to be clear like the ideology of psych one is i care that it's mystifying and whatever else get on and just build it um which is what we did with transistors right and jeremy also makes a great point i have to say that because he's my ceo and former professor but um he'll occasionally when people bring up this like mysterious reputation he'll say look imagine that you go to the average technology conference where people are using transistors all day and say hey guys can you get up on the whiteboard and tell me how a transistor works you know taught me through fermi levels and electron hole pairs and whatever and it's like no chance even at a physics conference most people will struggle to remember how a transistor works pretty bloody mysterious device in many ways and that doesn't matter because we just get on and use it and build them and make them smaller and make them denser and everything else and and so yeah generally the right attitude for what we're doing is not to think about those mysterious components but on the weekend and in the evenings uh i do think about them and and to answer your question like the best illustration i have as to why we still don't have good natural language explanations for quantum physics is from about 20 years ago science paper about the self-stability of the bicycle i don't know if you've ever seen this no uh this thing it's really nice so you take a bicycle like a regular bush ride and push it up to speed with no rider iron just push it on the on the saddle let go and it'll roll along and then if you give it a kick from the side it'll fall over and then it kind of flips back up comes back upright um it's quite it's kind of it's worth doing with like a jump keel bike it's quite surprising how aggressively stable it is brings itself straight back up and so oh why is the obvious question like why is the bicycle self-stable so people offer these kind of explanations they'll say oh it's centrifugal force right like the wheel is spinning and so it's like a centrifuge and it wants to stay stable that one doesn't quite work right because centrifuges will stay in one place but if you push them off axis they don't flip back up they just like to stay wherever they are so then people said well what it is is actually a cross product effect so as you push the wheel over to the side it also wants to rotate and it happens that it's going to rotate in the right direction to bring the wheel bring the bike back up upright then people say no no it's not the centrifugal stuff at all it's actually the rake of the fork you know the fork usually has a curve in it and so they say that means that you know when the bike is tipping over actually there's a rotational force on the front fork that turns the wheel in the right direction brings brings the contact point back under the center of gravity and they tell all these stories right um and each one of them sounds kind of vaguely plausible and so then this group in the netherlands went out and built a bicycle where they take every one of those stories that people told and they invert each effect so like on the wheels they have a counter propagating wheel that's spinning the other way so there's no centrifugal force and then they take the fork and they invert it so they have the rig going the other way and then like all of these explanations they go and invert them take the bicycle bring it up to speed kick the saddle and the thing comes straight back upright that was kind of an illustration of like a completely classical system where you can ask a pretty basic question and why is this thing flipping up?

11:31And all of the stories that you tell about that system are like none of them actually are true. And so, yeah, hopefully that's vaguely demystifying as to what is going on in quantum mechanics. Where is the electron when it goes through the double slit? That's the basic question. Is it in one hole, the other hole, both holes, or something else? That's an unanswerable question and has been for 100 years. The mathematics, dead easy, are totally uncontroversial. You mentioned Jeremy being your professor, but am I right to say that you're in a research group? I'm curious, I'd love to learn more about sort of the origin story of how the founding team met and the source of the insight to say, let's do something useful.

12:17Yeah, so Jeremy's been in quantum computing 25 years. He actually started out pursuing a competing technology. so he started out doing phosphorus in silicon cubits so basically taking like a scanning tunneling microscope tip like a little sharp spike picking up single phosphorus outlets and putting them into a silicon lattice one by one he was doing that in australia and then um crisis of faith around that that it would not scale up um and it was around that time that this optical approach suddenly became at least plausible if not viable there was some architectural breakthroughs and so then he jumped on this like optics quantum computing and rapidly did the first two-qubit gate for photons uh together with jack prides who's a griffith and is uh also part of the team here at sarcondu and so that was done with like bits of glass on an optics bench so like taking big chunks of glass, mirrors, lenses, bolting them to a bench.

13:21But it worked. Jesus of papers. And then he was always just obsessed with this idea that if you want a million qubits, which is what you need to do anything useful, a million is a really big number unless you're in a commercial semiconductor fab. And so his obsession from the beginning was, we've got to get into a big fab so that we can make enough qubits to have something useful and so he went to bristol in the uk and teamed up with mark our other co-founder he's british uh mark had worked at the world's first silicon photonics company so he was like a photonic chip person by training and yeah that research group just started to print chips and put photons on the chip which was just a sort of like rocket ship idea like once they started with that they just had an endless roadmap of research laid out in front of them where they could print this chip print that chip take this result put it on a chip and instead of mucking around like trying to align optics and stabilize a bench this whole thing was just sitting on a little printed chip so that research group grew to about 100 people i joined when it was maybe 10 people something like out i was just really lucky to be in the right place at the right time when they were getting started and i guess around 2015 terry had a uh graduate student mercedes him in a segobia she had come to imperial in to visit the bristol group so she'd come to see our chips and by this time we had you know chips that were doing basic calculations we put one online and let people play around with it we could calculate properties molecules and and she came to see that and immediately she said terry and she said these guys are going to build a photonic quantum computer terry this is what i want to do my phd on and terry said oh mercedes no no i've given up on that that's it's never going to work i'm going to go and live on a cloud and you know become a god of physics and whatever else and Mercedes is from from Madrid she's Spanish and she said no Terry they're gonna do it and I am gonna work on it and so Terry basically said well look Mercedes if you can show an architecture for optical quantum computing that has these particular characteristics that have been a little bit elusive then maybe I'll think about it and so she went away found the architecture i helped her with a few of the very very basic simulations for that thing uh i moved to imperial by that time and yeah that architecture the work that was going on at bristol that group of like you know all the while terry mark and jeremy and i have been going back and forth on the train between bristol and imperial and suddenly we just kind of hit this point where we were like we could actually do this it's like extraordinarily hard blah blah blah but we can do it let's get on and there's no way we're doing this at a university you know there's probably no way we're doing it in the uk uh we need access to a real semiconductor fab and we probably need hundreds of semiconductor industry people and so we moved to silk and valley and start the company what a story what is the difference i love the analysis like just the imagery of someone stroking their chin it's not entirely uh unrealistic no but but it captures the the theory of quantum and the theory of or like at least the criticism that that quantum is just a research business.

17:07But you've said, and Jeremy too, he spoke the other day at Sunrise, and it was clear that everyone is building value. And I'm curious how the journey of it becoming real, and what is the difference between a research project and actually building a venture-backable company? There's a lot of quantum computing efforts out there. There's a lot of companies. and one of the things that's happened in the last let's say five or ten years that has gone under under the radar a little bit is that at this point everyone has got really good qubits you know that quantum computing is a space where there's like an enormous amount of mudslinging that goes on everyone's talking about why their competitor is useless and whatever else but there's something to celebrate which is that actually ion traps superconducting qubits silicon spins quantum dots photons suddenly everyone has got like really nice qubits like three or four nines of single qubit fidelity at least two nines of two qubit fidelity it's kind of table stakes that's happened a little quietly it used to be that it was like a huge deal if you got one qubit with even half decent fidelity and then in terms of like the differentiation and the the sort of exiting the lab stuff that you talked about the first thing is what is your goal and the second thing is what is your dna and the goal has been messed up like for a long time where the whole space basically bifurcated into people who thought that the goal was a million qubits in full error correction and people who thought that the goal was like 200 qubits and some error mitigation and these are just like obviously like ludicrously different goals by fours and minor teeth so if if you were in the camp he thought that like 300 qubits would be enough then the The type of organization that you needed to achieve that was only incrementally different to a research group, right?

19:05Like to go from 10 qubits to like 300 qubits, that's not a giant endeavor. That's an extension of a research group. Whereas to go from 10 qubits to a million qubits, that's something different entirely. And there was deep confusion over what the goal was, what was the target. I would say that that confusion is now getting cleared up where people haven't found anything useful to do with 300 or 500 qubits and i'd say that whole space broadly is uh in some cases painfully admitting yeah it turns out we did need a million qubits we do need a giant system so how why is it a million it's not exactly a million it's roughly a million but that number has stayed roughly the same for about 25 years and if you ask people at conferences now still what are you thinking really typically most people will say are probably about a million of qubits you'll type um that's been the same for 25 years you read jeremy's thesis from 25 years ago the conclusion is like i've made one phosphorus and silicon qubit probably need about a million to do anything as well so then like if you if you then accept that a million is is the right number which i think most people are now accepting then it's a question of what is the dna of your organization.

20:19And the origin of all of these teams is university research. Like all quantum computing efforts, always without exception, are founded by university academics, typically like a decorated university professor with a good number of nature papers under that bell. And I think then you can just organize these teams on an axis of the extent to which they've been able to make a genuine departure from being a research group. And our view is that if you're actually going to build a million qubit machine, like enormous amounts of silicon, networking, firmware, cooling, infrastructure, high volume manufacturing, whatever, you need to make a full departure from being a university academic.

21:09And not everyone agrees with us on that, but that is like our view that's what we think you know it's possible of course to stay at a university and contribute to a grand engineering project there's a history of that going on but um and i understand why that is often like um a desirable thing for people but um for whatever reason i i think we were founded by a group of people who had gotten to a point in their career not me but my colleagues had gotten to a point in their career where they had seen enough and done enough that they could afford to say, I never want to publish another nature paper again in my life.

21:49I couldn't care less if I get invited to another conference. I actually want to do it. I actually want to build the real thing. And this is the only thing I want to do with my life. And yeah, move their lives and families to California, start the company, quit their jobs. I think that is a defining piece of our DNA that we went all in and ignored a lot of advice and boldly set the target at all or nothing basically. And yeah, that's a function of the character and like career direction of the people I was founding the company with, I would say. there is one additional component there which is the technology so in order to make a bet like that you have to at least half believe that the technology can get to that kind of scale quickly and we had a technological advantage there which is that with photonics we knew that we could go to a big fab that does 10 000 wafer starts per day makes billions of devices so that gave us some like technical foundation to feel like yeah you know what if we can access that leverage this kind of uh all or nothing that is is defensible and then we had things like cooling where we run at considerably higher temperature than for instance a superconducting qubit that gave us a path to using a much simpler higher power cryogenic cooling systems we knew that we could do the networking, network the chips together with telco fiber.

23:30It's considerably easier for us than some of the other approaches. And so that was the technical foundation for saying this isn't a new invention type of activity. This is a challenging engineering scale-up type of activity. So that's a prerequisite to leap out of the university and burn the ships. Can you share more about, you said there were two parts. One is ensuring that you've got the right goal. And then what is the DNA to get to that goal? Can you share more about size DNA? Honestly, and I hope you take this with a grain of salt. Like we were essentially founded on an anti-academic vector.

24:16Yeah. Right. I'm saying that again with three co-founders who were highly decadent professors of physics and electrical engineering with big research groups in university. I think it is important that when we started, we basically said never again, right? Like never again are we going to do that. And that's overdriving, right? Like that's an overreaction to something. So the problematic stuff that we saw, which is that in academia, you can just keep on publishing nature papers forever. You can keep on just doing more and more interesting things that don't actually bring you any closer to the real goal.

24:55And that also led to a few things like the fact that we didn't make ourselves the technical leadership. We actually went and found semiconductor industry people like veterans at the semiconductor industry and so on to really run the technical show. We, of course, are heavily involved. You know, there's a parallel universe where we believed ourselves to be God's gift to engineering. And that would have been a deep mistake, I think. And then also, yeah, we went and hired all of the best people we knew in academia. Of course, we went and found quantum algorithms people, quantum error correction people who we need, who are very rare, who we need through our network.

25:39But we were, from the very beginning, charging to make sure that the makeup of the team was not the makeup of a research group. there's some there's a trope that colleagues at blackbird will have heard a thousand times which is that somebody like me walks into um their office and says i've got this uh crazy thing i want to do but the good news is that it used to be science and now it's engineering and like they expect people to say oh brilliant oh genius yeah yeah oh amazing what you're telling me you're me that it used to be science and now it's engineering oh

26:23fantastic and so that's fine like that's nice i say that too but like what do you mean by that from day one right like we were clear that cannot be us we need to go out and high and by the way again a prerequisite is that you actually have an approach to building a quantum computer in which the devices and systems that you are building are not extremely novel science experiments. They have to be leveraging existing technology that a person from the microelectronics industry, from the semiconductor industry, can understand, work on, contribute to from day one without learning a bunch of quantum nonsense stuff.

27:09And so that was built into our approach. not just the leverage of the fab and the machines, but also actually the leverage of the expertise and the human capital of the semiconductor industry. And so, yeah, the DNA of the company, I would say, is formed in part by that first 50 people that we brought into the organization. And that was by design much broader than a bunch of physicists. We got a bunch of physicists, of course, but we were really driving to bias it much, much broader than that. You spoke about the, I guess, the uniqueness of all the different types of skills that are being brought to the table.

27:52I'm curious what you've learned about team design that's specific to your team. Yeah. So as far as team design, I'll come back to that. I will answer the question, but let me tell just one little anecdote that might be interesting to this audience. So, of course, we did need some of those highly academically elite, mathematically oriented people from whatever, research groups. And this is a conundrum that I think founders of deep tech companies often face, is that you start hiring these people and then they say, oh, I want to be able to continue to publish and I want to be able to continue to go to conferences.

28:39And basically, I want to be able to doss around and be an academic forevermore whilst getting paid more money. And sorry, but you get some kind of money like that. And then founders wring their hands and say, oh my God, how do I get this special talent that I desperately need? but you know make sure that they're happy and comfortable on and we did some of that hand wringing early on when we were less experienced and you think maybe we need to put bean bags in office and bring them like copies of nature every morning to read whatever else and we had this one candidate who was like the most extreme version of that like they were the pep like this was like the person the dream parts we've got to get him if we lose this person the whole company is finished yeah whatever else and so we think oh i get this person sitting down and they're gonna ask they're gonna ask about sabbaticals and you know all this kind of stuff and uh and instead what for whatever reason when we got when we started talking to this person we basically said you know what you're going to come here to Saquonor and you are never going to see sunlight ever again.

29:58We're going to lock you in a brook and they're never going to go to a conference and you're never going to have a thought-provoking conversation. You are simply going to make the number go up and you're going to be essential, profound technical work, right? Or inspiringly hard technical work, but you're going to do it in service of the company and in service of the making the number go up and this person basically said thank god and the thing that i've realized since is that the really elite people like the really good people they know that they are god's gift to topological quantum error correction or bloody quantum algorithms or whatever it is and if you really know that about yourself do you really care that like you got another invited conference talk or do you care about you know spending your life actually solving the real problems and contributing to the forward motion of our species right and so that person ended up coming ended up being one of the most like an incredibly productive member of the team and yeah I really felt like I learned something from them which is that you know that that wouldn't work with a bunch of people like it's they are that doesn't sound very fun i'm going to go do something else but i reckon for the rarefied air of people who really know and really are special like that's actually that lost them straight in like hell yeah this is what i'm gonna do so yeah i don't know that was and then i love that anecdote and then uh uh i'm exaggerating obviously we didn't actually say you'll never see some way again but um but it's a useful model because it's like you need to know who you are and who you're not to attract the people that you want yeah yeah and and that and that actually is is the second point which is you know there's a parallel universe where we twisted ourselves into knots right and we said and we pretended to be something that we are we pretended to be a research research group yeah yeah yeah it's going to be friendly and easier you can con your sabbatical and whatever else twisted ourselves into knots for this person's benefit they came and then they found out that that's actually not what we are and that's just horrible for everyone and so by just by like adopting an extreme position which is what we've always done so quantum i always try to articulate like we just adopt an extreme position on the spectrum in various different degrees of for you by doing that you disqualify yourself automatically with a wide range of people who don't like the streams and that's fine and it's like lovely to meet you look perfectly lovely people but um it means that you self-select for people who are going to love it to first order yeah that that has been a re-by-sting this sort of work so yeah and then you asked about team design honestly i think the answer there is a little more boring which is that the sort of makeup of the team is from what i've seen it's basically a very mundane function of what we need and how much each piece we need you know we architecture we need algorithms we need atomic chip design we need process engineering we need you know mechanical design that are laws and as as we walked along the the roads we've picked those people up as and when we need them So one of the most exciting things for me actually the last few months has been that we've got oil and aerospace people now joining the company.

33:37And so you say, why? Oil and gas. So this cryoplant that went from Brisbane, 30 ,000 square foot industrial helium with fire, the compressors in that are Westinghouse mining gear, basically. So they're like, yeah, it's a big piece of mining equipment. And then the aerospace stuff, we do all these vacuum systems. We do chunks of stainless steel, lace it via low temperature in vacuum. And so those are pretty relevant skills for aerospace engineers. That's just a sort of the makeup of the team really just comes out in necessity. And I haven't seen any kind of profound strategy there. It's more the instinct of the hiring managers and the EPEs.

34:21Can you share a couple of examples on like breaking down some of the enormous milestones and achieving that technical progress yeah so it's like when it gets flat right like understandably we're sticking our neck out on a on something that's never been done before so people say don't do it i understand that that's fine the reason i'm still here right after eight years is having had the privilege of being up close with eye-watering accomplishments. And when we started out, right, we said a number of things that should have had us incarcerated. So we're going to take superconductors, like superconducting pin films.

35:01We're going to go to a commercial semiconductor foundry that's building chips for laptops, cell phones, cars, etc. Couldn't care less that you have a cool, like scientifically provocative project. roofless you know 200 000 square foot single span ballroom building takes 25 minutes to walk from one corner of the room to the other corner of the room are uh right like like scary people from when i was an ex-academic that put the fear of god into me that these people are just going to throw us out of that building and say what are you what are you guys doing on our front doorstep uh so yeah Oh yeah, we're going to put superconductors in there.

35:40We're going to put 10 new shipping container-sized semiconductor manufacturing tools on the shop floor. We're going to improve our architecture at an exponential rate year on year for six years without failure. We're going to improve the resources required for our algorithms at an exponential rate for eight years running, despite the fact that they already look pretty optimized. We're going to make chips where we have a heater on the chip that is a few hundred degrees Celsius. so it is above the boiling point of water and would burn you if you touch it. That's going to be millimeters away from superconducting detectors below the temperature of deep space, so 2.3 Kelvin.

36:19We're going to shine a laser into the chip that's a trillion times brighter than the single photon that we have to detect. So the optical dynamic range on the chip is equivalent to the optical dynamic range between a ship-mounted U.S. Navy laser weapon and the dimmest star visible to the human eye. we're going to achieve like you know 99 % fidelity despite all of that thermal and awful dynamic range we're going to build a completely new class of cryostat for quantum computing the chandelier thing that everyone uses that's going to go in the trash uh we're going to achieve like you know 10 times more cooling power and much higher density in these systems oh yeah but along the way we're going to have to go to two different national labs one of which is a nuclear facility we're going to persuade them to let us in the front door and give us helium um so we're basically going to commandeer some particle accelerators uh oh shit we got to raise a billion dollars in private capital um to pay for all this stuff uh you know the list oh we're to develop a completely new 300 millimeter epitaxial growth process for a optical switching material that is not available in industry and build the biggest molecular beam epitaxy tool in the world which contains molten titanium at a few thousand degrees celsius and liquid helium at deep space temperature both exposed to the same vacuum chamber you know like call the ambulance like call the ambulance this person is at risk and you know what I mean and yeah we did a lot so now the job is to like say a few more things I can yeah and like we're going to put 3 ,000 photon sources into the alpha system the way that I rationalize this is that I think about, I like self-driving.

38:21It wouldn't work as law on this. So with self-driving, like when I arrived in Silicon Valley, really serious technical people told me, you will never see a self-driving car in your lifetime. They said, you're going to see, yeah, you'll see demos. They'll get to like 90%. Maybe they get to 95%. But there's no way that they're getting to the safety and reliability and whatever. They're going to actually drive around San Francisco with nobody behind the wheel. And of course, now it's just like every other car you see in San Francisco is at Waymo. And then the second one that I would point to is Intel.

38:57I'm pretty sure that if he marched into Intel during the height of Moore's law and spoke to the engineers, I think the engineers probably would have told you our leadership are deranged. Our leadership think that we're going to do a 2X this year, a 2x next year and a 2x the following year i can tell you there's no freaky way we get 2x this year maybe 1.5x that there's engineering constraint that shows that we can't do that a second 2x and then there's a physical reason why you can't even get the last one and then they went worked on it hard and they got to 1.x 1.8x the first year and then they made it 2.3x the next year and then they 11.9x the following year and like i'm pretty sure that that that machinery is kind of normal and that's what we've seen really up close in in the company that when we when we originally put those wave led loss targets and you know detector efficiency and so on in front of people four or five years ago there was pretty close to me to the year eventually in saying these numbers are just ridiculous and especially propulsive which you were execute and um uh and and credit to them based them are down a bit got on with it and they've delivered like astonishing numbers if you can just help us to imagine like we can't imagine life without transistors can you share some of the useful applications you're just excited for the world to live with yeah so i mean if you look at our current list of customers and partners who are kind of working with us to get ready for the existence of a big quantum computer it is car companies materials aerospace finance a little bit healthcare pharmaceuticals and you know generally they're looking to use the quantum computer to design drugs catalysts fuels fertilizers new materials semi-deductive manufacturing processes, like microscopic stuff, right?

41:00Overwhelmingly, their interest is in molecules, reactions, materials, stuff that lies at the substrate of our advanced society. And the reason that they care is that right now, in many cases, we are flailing around in the dark when we try to design those things on a computer. Not in all cases, but in many cases. when we use conventional supercomputers to try to design these things. We end up having to make gross approximations that lead to essentially useless simulations. And so the promise of quantum computing is that we don't have to make those same approximations. And we end up with something that basically I think of as a categorically new level of mastery over chemistry, physics, and math.

41:49and so to considerable extent we hope to no longer be flailing around in the dark and a good example of this is like wind tunnels so we used to make wind tunnels to design aircraft and you'd get also wood out and whatever else and lope a thing in and play smoke over it and now the wind tunnels are mothballed and we just use computational fluid dynamics just fire up the computer, get a nice specialization, and then move the mouse around to change the structure of the WIC. And so, yeah, we want to have the same kind of rapid design, deterministic design for the microscopic foundations of our advanced society.

42:36And so the final point here is, computer computing is not a mass adoption technology. It sounds good to say every child will learn to program a computer. That's us. You think about some of the most consequential, enduring, important businesses of our time, TSMC, ASML, SpaceX, NVIDIA. These companies build products where actually the number of people who interact with the product directly is very small. Like how many people actually do a tape out of TSMC? How many people directly use an ASML? The machine, how many people design a satellite that goes on a SpaceX launch? You know, that is an involved frontier kind of technology.

43:20But the second and third order products of those technologies, the chips that we use, Starlink, satellite communications, whatever, those are then used broadly by the general populace. And so we expect quantum computing to have the same kind of dynamics where in the foreseeable future, I think it's going to be a small number of people who directly interact with the quantum computer. but the real hope is that one day people will use drugs fuels catalysts fertilizers etc that wouldn't exist without the simulations that are only possible with a quantum computer and honestly i hope that one day they use those things without ever knowing that they were designed on a quantum computer and without even caring uh that would be just fine as far as i'm concerned peter thank you so much we can't wait to see your progress it is such an exciting time and just thank you for moving humanity forward oh well thank you i we're like extremely lucky to have the support from blackbird and from australia of course and i am very lucky to get to work on a less than a once in a lifetime activity like this and i've uh tremendously enjoyed the conversation thank you so much peter

44:41Thank you so much for joining us on the latest episode of Wild Hearts. If you want to learn from other ambitious people who are building, designing, and creating the world that we want to live in, then please hit the follow or subscribe button. It would mean the world to us here on the Wild Hearts team. We have an insane producer, Amelia Rayner, and we're edited by Andy Jones and Sanjay Chavaria at day one. And our marketing and content support is provided by Jonathan Bleakley. We couldn't do it without them. If you're searching for investment, please reach out. dams are always open and this is our final episode for the season we'll be taking a short break and we'll be back later in the year talk to you soon wild hearts